I found the guide to be pretty disjointed so not sure if I covered all the relevant bases or not, truithfully.
I've done a quick bit of research myself (i.e. googling...) and I concur. The documentation on installing/enabling "VisualEditor" is a mess! Not that we're in any position to make too much noise about inadequate documentation - TurnKey docs are fairly poor, to average at best. But still I get the frustration.
From what I can gather, it seems that the VisualEditor code (i.e. the VisualEditor plugin code) is now included in MediaWiki "Core". So that bit only needs to be enabled (what you've tried from what I gather). I can't find it now, but I recall reading somewhere that it will only work OOTB for new posts (will fail when editing existing posts). To get it to work while editing, more moving parts are required. There is talk about the "Parsoid library" (wiki markup to/from html parser) but it seems that that too is now included in MediaWiki "Core".
Another part required appears to be the RESTBase server. As I suspected, that is a RESTful API server. That is a NodeJS application (as opposed to PHP - like the rest of MediaWiki), that needs to be installed separately (can be on the same server - or not as you prefer). Hopefully those instructions will "just work", but it seems somewhat outdated, so I'm not 100% sure if that's the case (and the amount of random threads online with people having issues suggests that it's a PITA to get working). I also note that the RESTbase code readme also has install instructions but they are pretty minimal and the MediaWiki doc page has much more detail about config.
But wait, that's not all...! It seems that RESTbase also needs a DB backend (and doesn't use MySQL/MariaDB). It appears to use Cassandra (a NoSQL DB server). Unfortunately, Cassandra isn't packaged in Debian, but thankfully it seems that there is a Cassandra Debian apt repo which can be used to install Cassandra. Having said that, that doc page (again) looks really dated and I think we can do better. This page is better, although it notes to get the "latest version", use the '40x' repo - where the current v4 stable release actually appears to be '41x' - as noted on this page (about halfway down, under the heading "Installation from Debian packages").
To add to the confusion, it appears that there is also a v5.0 Cassandra release (which I'd guess would use a apt repo of '50x'?). However, it's unclear to me whether that is "stable" or not yet? As such, I'd probably be inclined to start with v4.1 (i.e. the '41x' repo). Although I note that the MediaWiki specific docs note a much older version of Cassandra. I'm working on the assumption that as those docs are clearly out of date, you'd actually want a recent version. However, there is a risk that the MediaWiki docs aren't as outdated/wrong as I suspect and you actually may need an older Cassandra version?
So TL;DR it looks pretty involved... Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, although at least it explains why you haven't been having any joy with it so far... Hopefully the links I've shared here help get you closer, but considering the complexity (and the scattered/incomplete/outdated docs), I won't at all be surprised if you need to circle back for additional help.
If/when you do come back to report issues, please post as much info as possible about what you've done so far and what the exact error(s) are (i.e. verbatim error message text) and where you are seeing them (e.g. log file, following cli commands, etc).
If your current MediaWiki server has content that you care about, I recommend starting with a clean MediaWiki server for the "trial and error" that will likely be required to get this all working. I also strongly suggest that you take notes of everything you do as you do it. That way once you're done, you can (re)follow those steps "for real" on your current server - and share them with us for the benefit of other users and as I noted, perhaps we'll look to include it by default?
Also if you're not already hosting your servers via some sort of virtualization, now would be a good time to start (at least for this development/testing). That way you can easily take snapshots when ever you appear to be having progress. Then if things go pearshaped, you can roll back to a known good state and refer to your notes to get back to where you were.
Good luck and please post back anytime and I'll try to respond ASAP (although please be aware when I'm deep in "dev mode" I can be a bit slow...). If you manage to work it out, please do share your notes! :)
Thanks for that.
Thanks for the additional info.
I've done a quick bit of research myself (i.e. googling...) and I concur. The documentation on installing/enabling "VisualEditor" is a mess! Not that we're in any position to make too much noise about inadequate documentation - TurnKey docs are fairly poor, to average at best. But still I get the frustration.
From what I can gather, it seems that the VisualEditor code (i.e. the VisualEditor plugin code) is now included in MediaWiki "Core". So that bit only needs to be enabled (what you've tried from what I gather). I can't find it now, but I recall reading somewhere that it will only work OOTB for new posts (will fail when editing existing posts). To get it to work while editing, more moving parts are required. There is talk about the "Parsoid library" (wiki markup to/from html parser) but it seems that that too is now included in MediaWiki "Core".
Another part required appears to be the RESTBase server. As I suspected, that is a RESTful API server. That is a NodeJS application (as opposed to PHP - like the rest of MediaWiki), that needs to be installed separately (can be on the same server - or not as you prefer). Hopefully those instructions will "just work", but it seems somewhat outdated, so I'm not 100% sure if that's the case (and the amount of random threads online with people having issues suggests that it's a PITA to get working). I also note that the RESTbase code readme also has install instructions but they are pretty minimal and the MediaWiki doc page has much more detail about config.
But wait, that's not all...! It seems that RESTbase also needs a DB backend (and doesn't use MySQL/MariaDB). It appears to use Cassandra (a NoSQL DB server). Unfortunately, Cassandra isn't packaged in Debian, but thankfully it seems that there is a Cassandra Debian apt repo which can be used to install Cassandra. Having said that, that doc page (again) looks really dated and I think we can do better. This page is better, although it notes to get the "latest version", use the '40x' repo - where the current v4 stable release actually appears to be '41x' - as noted on this page (about halfway down, under the heading "Installation from Debian packages").
To add to the confusion, it appears that there is also a v5.0 Cassandra release (which I'd guess would use a apt repo of '50x'?). However, it's unclear to me whether that is "stable" or not yet? As such, I'd probably be inclined to start with v4.1 (i.e. the '41x' repo). Although I note that the MediaWiki specific docs note a much older version of Cassandra. I'm working on the assumption that as those docs are clearly out of date, you'd actually want a recent version. However, there is a risk that the MediaWiki docs aren't as outdated/wrong as I suspect and you actually may need an older Cassandra version?
So TL;DR it looks pretty involved... Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, although at least it explains why you haven't been having any joy with it so far... Hopefully the links I've shared here help get you closer, but considering the complexity (and the scattered/incomplete/outdated docs), I won't at all be surprised if you need to circle back for additional help.
If/when you do come back to report issues, please post as much info as possible about what you've done so far and what the exact error(s) are (i.e. verbatim error message text) and where you are seeing them (e.g. log file, following cli commands, etc).
If your current MediaWiki server has content that you care about, I recommend starting with a clean MediaWiki server for the "trial and error" that will likely be required to get this all working. I also strongly suggest that you take notes of everything you do as you do it. That way once you're done, you can (re)follow those steps "for real" on your current server - and share them with us for the benefit of other users and as I noted, perhaps we'll look to include it by default?
Also if you're not already hosting your servers via some sort of virtualization, now would be a good time to start (at least for this development/testing). That way you can easily take snapshots when ever you appear to be having progress. Then if things go pearshaped, you can roll back to a known good state and refer to your notes to get back to where you were.
Good luck and please post back anytime and I'll try to respond ASAP (although please be aware when I'm deep in "dev mode" I can be a bit slow...). If you manage to work it out, please do share your notes! :)